6: Forms of control

The forms of control of the system of production by capital can be
highly varied. They can, however, be put into two broad groups:

1. Forms of control of production by means of controls
of the price and distribution systems leading to particular types of
subordination of the peasants, that vary from case to case.

2. Capital inserts itself directly into production and openly
exploits a wage labour force. This is typical agricultural capitalism.
Capitalist relations of production are present here, whereas they were not in
the first case.

Between the first case in which the peasant still retains some
degree of autonomy, although being subject to some extent to capital, and the
second case in which the peasant is nothing but an agricultural labourer who
sells his labour power, produces surplus value for the agricultural capitalist
and collects his wages, there are other situations in which the peasant occupies
intermediate positions, sometimes closer to those of the autonomous peasants,
sometimes to those of the agricultural labourer.

The first case, in which capital limits its activities to an
indirect control of production, is the commonest one in sub-Saharan Africa. The
peasant has his own land and his rudimentary instruments of production. He
produces for his own consumption and partly for the market. He may also produce
essentially for the market, i.e., by devoting himself to cash crops and hoping
to be able to buy foodstuffs with the income from these crops. The provision of
inputs and the collection of products are carried out by other structures or
other social strata. The colonial administration and trading companies that
performed this function during the colonial period were replaced after
independence by a new national administration and structures. Local traders
occupied, and sometimes still continue to occupy, a major position. Similarly,
to a lesser extent and more recently, transnational corporations are directly
present in some states. The activities over which the peasant has no control at
all cover upstream provision of credit for inputs and sometimes technical
back-up. Downstream, they include the collection of products and their transport
to local processing plants or their sale abroad.

These national or foreign agencies, as well as the social strata
that control these activities, are also those that dominate the fixing of
prices, in both directions - both for the goods supplied by the peasants and the
goods supplied to the peasants, the latter usually not being subject to
price-fixing. Thus, they are subordinated to capital which extracts from them a
significant amount of surplus labour through control of all the distribution
circuits.

Dominating the system of price-fixing, the capitalist sector tends
not only to keep the prices paid to producers as low as possible, but at the
same time substantially to raise the prices paid by the same producers to
purchase inputs.

The explanations given to justify this double extortion to which
peasants are subjected are always the same: to cover transport and management
expenses and international competition. But the reality is that on the basis of
this intense exploitation, capital flourishes and the dominant classes operate a
major transfer of peasant resources to their own benefit. Some examples from the
Sahel zone will illustrate these extractions of resources to which peasants are
continually subjected. Between 1965 and 1974, in ten years, the producer price
of groundnuts rose by only 16% in Chad, 13% in Senegal and not at all in Burkina
Faso, whereas over the same period the price of groundnuts on the world market
had risen by 108%.

For cotton, over the same period, producer prices rose by 23% in
Chad, 6% in Senegal, 13% in Niger and 3% in Upper Volta, whereas the price of
cotton on the world market had risen by 118%.

Between 1967 and 1973, the Gambia Marketing Board, the state
agricultural produce marketing board, moved from a loss of 1.5 million Dalasis
to a profit of 9.7 million Dalasis. But producers' income rose by only 39%.

Between 1967-68 and 1972-73, the value of Senegal's groundnut
production fell from 22.1 to 20.5 billion Francs CFA. The producers' share fell
from 66% to 43%, whereas the income accruing to state bodies rose from 7% to
41%.

These are examples taken from public authorities which are not the
only ones involved in the process of extracting surplus labour from the peasants
through the price and distribution systems.

Thus, without being dispossessed of his land and his instruments
of production, the peasant finds himself in a situation where he is dispossessed
of his production itself. The logical consequence is that the peasant quite
often simply abandons the inputs and even cash crops and devotes himself almost
entirely to growing foodstuffs. Instead of the intensification encouraged by the
suppliers of inputs, the peasants prefer an extensive agriculture which, despite
its ecological consequences, guarantees them less dependence and fewer debts.
This altogether rational behaviour - many researchers argue the reverse - leads
to the rapid impoverishment of soils. Caught in the vice of excessive
indebtedness and low productivity leading to the same shrinking of incomes, the
peasant often finds himself forced to leave the land and migrate.

But capitalism is not interested here in getting hold of the land,
just as it did not seek to alter the tenure system so as to dispossess the
peasant of the land. This is because, in general, in these cases, land is
relatively plentiful - albeit often impoverished land - which means that land
has no commercial value, or only a very low one. Then, direct working of the
land here involves major risks. These risks include the uncertainty of the
weather, costly clearing work, high cost of inputs, etc. These are all factors
which can raise the costs of production and reduce the possibilities of profit.
Capital thus has an interest in leaving it to the peasants to work the land
directly and so bear the risks that involves.

We are here dealing with the following situation: peasants,
without being dispossessed of the land and while keeping their means of
production, lose control of their production to the capitalist sphere which
dominates the distribution system. How then can the status of these peasants be
described? Are they proletarians as some have suggested? Can one say that these
peasants are producers of surplus value? This question relates to theoretical
considerations which have been the subject of sometimes impassioned debates. The
school of thought that is opposed to the classical positions of Marxism, or the
supposedly classical positions, considers that the peasant so exploited is
simply a de facto proletarian producing surplus value. Behind the
appearances, behind the sale of products, lies concealed the sale of labour
power. According to this school of thought, it is necessary to go beyond the
immediate appearances and legal relations - the peasant owning the land and
those rudimentary means of production - and consider the economic relationships
at the level of the system as a whole in which the peasant is closely
integrated. Then, it would be realized that he simply sells his labour power to
capital, a sale that is dissimulated in the form of a commodity sale.

In short, he is seen as a proletarian. What should be made of the
thesis thus advanced by this school of thought? Is not the small peasant who has
his own land and his instruments of production, but is exploited in some way by
capital, simply a proletarian, and hence a producer of surplus value? We shall
try and make a few observations arising from the questions raised by this
thesis.

In our opinion, the danger of this thesis is that it reduces to a
single form the manner in which capital exploits labour. This single form is
seen as consisting in the sale of labour power and the production of surplus
value. Anyone exploited by capital would then be a proletarian.

But the notion of production of surplus value attached to the
appearance of a clearly determinate class, the proletariat, is a very precise
category in Marxism. It presupposes, on the one hand, the free worker owning
only his labour power and, on the other, the capitalist owning the means of
production, being able to buy this labour power and use it for more than the
time socially necessary for its reproduction. The difference between the labour
time necessary for the reproduction of labour power and the time the capitalist
uses this power constitutes surplus value. Once he buys it, the capitalist has
the labour power and uses it for the production of commodities.

For selling his labour power the worker receives a wage which
corresponds to the means of reproduction of the labour force given the
socio-economic characteristics of the country where the sale takes place. The
worker thus called a proletarian is a producer who is separated from the means
of production and separated from the product. The labour that he performs is
generally part of more collective labour.

The type of relationship that exists between the small peasant and
the capitalist does not seem to us to be of the same nature as the type of
relationship that links the proletarian to the capitalist.

Although both workers, small peasants and proletarians, are
exploited and subordinated to capital, the degree of subordination is not the
same, just as the dispossession of the labour process is not the same.

The small peasant who is exploited by means of the exchanges of
commodities that occur between him and capital - a merchant capital - can, when
he feels that the extortion of surplus value is being intensified, abandon, at
least in part, the production of commodities sought by the capitalist market. He
can thus reduce considerably, or even totally, the labour time that he devotes
to the production of commodities sought by that market in favour of, for
example, subsistence production. Similarly, he can give up the inputs offered by
the capitalist market once he realizes that these inputs cost him more than they
give him.

Occurrences like these, which can be observed frequently in the
Sudan and the Sahel in Africa in particular, where peasants can be seen giving
up inputs and abandoning cash crops to take up food crops, prove that they
retain a considerable freedom of manoeuvre. The small peasant has this
possibility of regulating his commitment to the system by reducing or increasing
his degree of integration, but the proletarian does not.

Of course, even the peasant who produces only foodstuffs finds
himself exploited by capital in the sense that he is obliged to market at least
part of his production because he lives in a money economy and he needs cash to
meet certain obligations. In doing so, he sells his products at very low prices
to non-foodstuff producers who in general work for the capitalist market and are
poorly paid, in particular because of the low prices of agricultural products.
Thus, the non-foodstuff producers find themselves exploited and through them,
the small peasants are too.

The peasant can even find himself in a situation where he is
distinctly more exploited than the proletarian by the fact that these products
are bought for far less than their value than is the labour power of the
proletarian. Thus, without being a producer of surplus value, the peasant can
have more of his surplus labour extorted from him. That in no way alters the
difference in kind that exists between surplus value and this form of extortion
of surplus labour. Some further observations can be added with regard to the
conditions under which they work and their ideological and political
consequences.

In capitalist production that generates surplus-value the labour
process is collective, whereas it is individual or family-based in small peasant
production.

Furthermore, insisting that the small peasant is tightly
integrated into the capitalist system may create the impression that he now
plays a completed and unalterable role in the general functioning of the system,
whereas the status of small peasants can evolve in the direction of kulakization
or in the direction of the deterioration of the conditions of existence leading
to rural exodus and proletarianization. Finally, the mere ownership of the land
and the means of production, however rudimentary they may be, leads to the
peasant behaving and having a set of reflexes that belong to a different
ideology from that of the proletarian: an individualist ideology underpinned by
the feeling of having the possibility of becoming a kulak.

Ultimately, we feel that so long as capital does not get involved
directly in the process of production, the peasant producer suffers a very
severe extortion of surplus labour, but it is different in kind from the
production of surplus value. The extortion of surplus labour occurs in the form
of a relation of distribution, whereas in the creation of surplus value a
relation of production is involved. This possibility of getting out of the
structures of the system makes us think that the subordination of the peasants
is rather informal. The still informal form of subordination that the modes of
production to which the small peasants belong are subjected to usually leads to
their regression.

In the case that we have just considered, we stressed particularly
the situation of the small peasant integrated into the system, but still
retaining a degree of autonomy which is manifested in the possibility of
disengaging, at least partly, from the structures that make this integration
possible. The case is widespread in the Sahel (Mali, Senegal, Niger, and Burkina
Faso especially) where groundnut- and cotton-growing, the main base of the
trading economy in this region, can suffer marked falls when the conditions of
existence of the peasants engaged in it seriously deteriorate.

Compared to this situation there are others where the form of
integration is much deeper, with capital getting involved directly in
production. This is the system of small peasants, or kulaks, mainly in the
plantation economies, state-irrigated lands worked by peasants who are like
agricultural labourers, and finally systems of production maintained by
multinationals. We think it can be said that in these cases we are really
dealing with a capitalist agriculture, even though nuances need to be
introduced. For, between the wealthy cocoa planter in the Ivory Coast and a
transnational producing out-of-season fruits and vegetables, there is a vast
difference. Generally speaking, in these cases the farms function as capitalist
enterprises. Communal appropriation of the land is disappearing and giving way
to private ownership.

The wealthy planter, the state owner or the foreign company
appropriate large tracts of land on which a large wage labour force works.
Production is almost wholly destined for the market. The means of production,
which are the very latest, require considerable investment.

Let us examine these three cases in which capital intervenes in
the process of production, which involves links between the peasants and these
various capitalists: the wealthy peasant who is generally a planter, the state
owner and the transnationals.

The wealthy peasant or planter, who is often the descendant of old
traditional chiefs, has a wage-earning labour force made up of agricultural
labourers. Around him lives a mass of often poor, independent peasants. This
wealthy peasant or planter, who we shall call a kulak, enjoys great influence
among the peasants. This influence shows itself in his tendency to occupy
leading roles in peasant associations or co-operatives. With a capital stock in
machinery and money, he exploits a wage-earning labour force. He hires out his
services and can make loans at often usurious rates to the independent peasants
who are to some extent dependent on him. He naturally has the reflexes and
behaviour of a landlord.

For big capital and the neocolonial state, he represents a natural
ally and the motor for the integration of the peasantry into the system. Since
he finds himself in a peculiar situation compared to the rest of the peasantry,
the vast majority of which remain poor, there develop between him and the rest
contradictions of a complex nature. The rest of the peasantry has both a
tendency to be hostile to him because of the economic power he possesses that
enables him to exploit the rest of the peasants, and to seek his favours because
of the political clout he possesses at the level of the country's leadership.
But the tendency will be rather for the antagonism to grow.

In fact, the process of the development of capitalism will lead to
a continued impoverishment of the mass of peasants, and this impoverishment will
go hand in hand with the enrichment of the kulaks. There will be cumulative
indebtedness on the one side, and increased accumulation on the other.
Eventually, the kulak will tend to enlarge his holdings by buying up those of
ruined peasants, who will be transformed into agricultural labourers or migrate
to the towns.

The kulak is situated in the capitalist sphere. From his
agricultural labourers he draws only less surplus value than the absolute
surplus value in relatively little developed conditions of capitalist relations
of production. The agricultural labourers here are in a situation of formal
subordination.

From the mass of peasants he extracts surplus labour in the
framework of relations of distribution. There again we are dealing with the type
of informal subordination previously examined.

This situation, which brings together the conditions for primitive
accumulation, is common in East Africa and southern Africa where the system of
land registration leading to its private appropriation is well advanced.
Variants are also to be found in the plantation areas of Central and West
Africa.

In the examples of development of a capitalist agriculture, we
have also mentioned the case of lands irrigated by the state on which peasants
work in conditions which are sometimes such that they are effectively
agricultural labourers. This refers to certain forms of intervention by the
authorities in the rural areas, where the state practically plays the role of
owner. Thus, the state, for example, lays out irrigated lands on which it puts
peasants to work according to conditions that it alone determines. These
interventions, whose aim is always said to be the improvement of the peasants'
living conditions, thus become means of extracting surplus labour.

Usually, the state allocates the peasants plots of irrigated land
which vary in size according to the size of families and to what means of
production are held. On these lands, the peasants are required to grow specified
crops.

A quite dense administrative and technical network surrounds the
various stages of the whole process of production, which is totally beyond any
control by the producers. The administrative structures provide management while
the technical structures determine working conditions. Management includes
supply of inputs, allocation of credits, collection of products and securing
repayment of debts. Prices and interest rates are wholly the responsibility of
the administration which is a state structure. The technical staff dictates and
controls the application of technical methods: timing and type of soil
preparation, timing of sowing and weeding, use of inputs, etc. The peasant is
subject to a strict agricultural calendar and cropping methods. If he fails to
respect these conditions his plot will be taken away from him. The peasant who
has to live with this situation is not the owner of the land. His plot is leased
to him, usually in exchange for payment of a fee. He does not own the inputs,
which he is often obliged to use. The credit conditions that enable him to
acquire these inputs border on the usurious. He is not free to choose his own
production methods, but must accept those imposed on him. Nor does he own the
product since he only receives a fraction of it after various deductions have
been made for fees, credit repayment, etc.

Thus, in many respects, this peasant finds himself in the
situation of a proletarian who simply sells his labour power and receives his
wage in kind. What is more, he is obliged to sell all or part of the portion of
the product that he does get at a price far below its value.

If the peasant here does not become a full-fledged proletarian
with a wage set in advance, it is again to make him bear the risks of a bad
harvest. In this system, in which the state receives a portion of peasant
surplus labour, the rest going to central capitalism through the operation of
unequal exchange, the peasant is super-exploited. The payment for his labour is
in no way related to the conditions of reproduction of his labour power. We are
dealing here with an agrarian state capitalism which reduces the peasantry to a
supplier of cheap manpower. The peasant simply sells his labour power, for which
he is paid in kind. He is an agricultural worker inserted in little developed
capitalist relations of production. Here, too, he suffers a formal
subordination.

Finally, in the examples of development of a capitalist
agriculture, there are the cases of interventions by transnationals and
agribusiness. The transnationals which are involved in agriculture attempt to
dominate all aspects of supplying inputs, purchasing products and processing
them, seeking out and controlling markets, fixing and manipulating prices.

However, intervention by transnationals in African agriculture is
not yet on a massive scale. In many countries, they are active in small areas or
are still at the experimental stage. Compared to the colonial companies of the
old days, their interventions have a number of peculiar features.

First, they do not hesitate to make or call on large investments
as has been shown by BUD (Bud Antler Inc. a multinational, based in California,
dealing in African business) in Senegal. BUD brought in highly qualified
technicians from Europe and America to set up an irrigation system based on
state of the art technology: drip irrigation with the water brought by pipeline
in a perforated tube over long distances.

They are also less concerned with actually owning the land knowing
that whatever the type of ownership, they can succeed in controlling the whole
system of production and distribution. In addition, non-ownership of the land
reduces fiscal problems and the risk of nationalization.

Again, as in the past, they are interested in export products,
sometimes even in very specialized products such as out-of-season vegetables
sought by consumers in the industrialized countries. But they are not only
interested in this. They sometimes attempt to organize local production to
supply African markets which they thus control. This is the case, for example,
with ranching which is developing in some West African countries with large
herds of livestock.

Finally, the contracts that bind the transnationals to African
states are built on unequal relations of force. Consequently, they can impose
conditions that seriously affect national resources: occupation of the best
lands, relentless exploitation of African manpower, taking over of some of their
setting-up costs by local public finance.

In the last analysis the transnationals and agribusiness seek to
combine for their own greater profit, technology - sometimes state-of-the-art
technology - with the cheap labour force and the natural advantages offered by
African agriculture, while also securing the political guarantee of national
states. We shall use the example of SODEPALM, in the Ivory Coast, an
agro-industrial group built up around BLOHORN, a shipowner, and owner of an
oil-palm company in the Ivory Coast. BLOHORN owned palm plantations worked by
agricultural labourers. At the same time, it controlled the production of
village planters. It processed the products into oil; with the development of
the group, made possible by participation by the state and the injection of
capital from external sources of finance, the activities extended to oil
products and to a whole new range of processing operations: table oil,
soap-making, margarine, detergents, etc. This is then an agro-industrial complex
with overwhelming economic and financial power compared to the average village
planters whose production it collects. These planters exploited 26,200 ha.
employing 6,000 peasant workers.

BLOHORN and SODEPALM directly exploited 42,000 ha. worked by
agricultural labourers. The domination of agro-industry by the BLOHORN group is
such that it makes any possibility of independence for the village planters
illusory. In these conditions, peasant agriculture exists only in name. The
village planters have no possibility of getting out of the system that grips
them. Decision-making powers belong to a power beyond any control by
wage-earners and planters. We are dealing with a vast industry which determines
salary conditions and income structures in the whole system of production and
distribution.

Thus, in the agro-industry controlled by BLOHORN in the framework
of SODEPALM the various forms of subordination of labour to capital are present.
Also present are relations of distribution, little developed relations of
production and fully developed capitalist relations of production. The small
planters who sell their products to SODEPALM are in a situation of informal
subordination, which is very close to the formal subordination of agricultural
labourers in the sense that their capacity to disengage themselves from the
system like the small peasants in the Sudan and the Sahel is greatly reduced.
Their degree of autonomy is weaker. Nevertheless, it can be said that they are
still integrated into relations of distribution with capital, with stronger
domination by capital. The agricultural labourers who work in the oil-palm
plantations of SODEPALM maintain little developed capitalist relations of
production with capitalism, and suffer formal subordination.

Finally, the manpower that works in the processing industries
produces every form of surplus value (absolute or relative) given advanced
techniques. It can be said that they are integrated into fully developed
capitalist relations of production. Their subordination to capital is complete
and entire. It is a real subordination.

To conclude: from the colonial period to the present day, African
agriculture has undergone and is still undergoing a great variety of changes,
changes which have led to various forms of domination by the capitalist mode of
production over the pre-capitalist modes of production that previously existed.
This domination led to a retreat of precapitalist modes of production, without
however the dislocation being total; such dislocation would not be in the
interest of capitalism. In fact, it is through maintaining precapitalist modes
of production that capitalism can ensure cheap agricultural production
perpetuating both the conditions of unequal exchange and those of low pay for
labourers working for capital.

During this long process of transforming agriculture, the
peasantry was integrated into the system in various forms, ranging from informal
subordination - the peasant, although exploited, retains some freedom of
manoeuvre vis-à-vis the structures of the system - to real subordination
in which the peasant leaves the land for the factories of agro-industry. He then
enters into fully developed capitalist relations of production. He becomes a
worker producing both absolute and relative surplus value.

In terms of these two statuses, that of formal subordination
corresponds to that of the agricultural labourer in which the worker, although
producing surplus value, finds himself integrated into as yet little developed
capitalist relations of production, with a limited level of technology that does
not allow surplus value to be extracted as fully as possible.

The intense extraction of surplus labour to which the peasants are
thus subjected, whatever their forms, lead to growing poverty and a profound
crisis of African agriculture, a crisis that is reflected at all levels of the
economic and social life of African countries.

The problem that remains posed is whether an alternative exists,
and what the conditions for its existence would
be.